JAVIER: 2014 Midseason Top 50 Prospects

Over the past few weeks on Twitter, I have been teasing a prospect evaluation system called JAVIER. Most everything is ready to go for the release at Beyond the Box Score, we are just waiting to do it during the All-Star break. However, since Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America both released their Top 50s, I thought I would tease this a little more in the form of a google document. Below is said document, giving JAVIER’s output of the 33 hitters who are placed on at least one of the aforementioned midseason top 50s. Much of this is without the context that the BtBS posts will provide on the system, but it is rather self-explanatory. The numbers are not league or age-adjusted, so take some of that with a grain of salt. However, Anderson, Nimmo, Frazier, and Mondesi all rank poorly so far into their minor league career. Nimmo is the odd one in that group, as his minor league numbers actually look fairly good. But of the 49 similar players, only one even made the major leagues – Delino DeShields.

I’ve also included age and league-adjusted values for the 2014 statistics for the above four prospects guessed as busts. I had to set Mondesi’s age range from 17 to 21, since not many prospects play High-A at age 18. There are four similar seasons to him with the age range set at 18-19 and the best MLB career from those was Ben Davis’s.